Trumpublicons: Foreign Influence/Grifting in '16 US Election

[seemslikeadream]

I'd hate for this to be purposely buried by someone derailing this thread


the purpose of deliberately derailing a thread is to obscure important information

Mueller probably has all of Nunberg's emails anyway


Sam Nunberg just had a first-class meltdown with KatyTurNBC live on MSNBC.

He outed himself as the source of her story about Special Counsel Mueller's TrumpRussia subpoena for docs dating to 11/1/2015.

And Nunberg just publicly announced that he's going to defy Mueller.

the Sam Nunberg MSNBC interview was one of the craziest bits of political TV ever. yelling about old Clinton scandals while admitting he thinks Trump is guilty, but says he won’t cooperate w/ Mueller because he wants to protect his emails w/ Roger Stone, Steve Bannon.

Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg called before grand jury, says he will refuse to go


Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said Monday that he has been subpoenaed to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election but that he will refuse to go.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Nunberg said he was asked to come to Washington to appear before the grand jury on Friday. He also provided a copy of his two-page grand jury subpoena seeking documents related to President Trump and nine other people, including emails, correspondence, invoices, telephone logs, calendars and “records of any kind.”

Nunberg forwarded an email from the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III seeking his appearance in front of the panel on Friday.

Among those that the subpoena requests information about are departing White House communications director Hope Hicks, former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and adviser Roger Stone.

Nunberg said he does not plan to comply with the subpoena, including either testimony or providing documents.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg said. “Mr. Mueller should understand I am not going in on Friday.”

Nunberg said he was planning to go on Bloomberg TV and tear up the subpoena.

It is unclear what actions Mueller would take if Nunberg does not appear in front of the grand jury. Nunberg, an early campaign aide, was dismissed by Trump and no longer is in his good graces.

“The Russians and Trump did not collude,” Nunberg said. “Putin is too smart to collude with Donald Trump.”

“I’m not spending 80 hours going over my emails with Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and producing them,” Nunberg said. “Donald Trump won this election on his own. He campaigned his ass off. And there is nobody who hates him more than me.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 89357597c8

THE NUNBERG SUBPOENA: IS HE PROTECTING BANNON, RATHER THAN TRUMP?

March 5, 2018/0 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

This WaPo article reporting that Sam Nunberg will refuse to appear before the Grand Jury on Friday confirms that the subpoena everyone reported on was his.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Nunberg said he was asked to come to Washington to appear before the grand jury on Friday. He also provided The Washington Post a copy of his two-page grand jury subpoena seeking documents related to President Trump and nine other people, including emails, correspondence, invoices, telephone logs, calendars and “records of any kind.”

Nunberg, who was reportedly already interviewed by Mueller’s team, says he’s not going to show up.

“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg said. “Mr. Mueller should understand I am not going in on Friday.”

You’d think he was doing this in hopes that Trump might protect him, except this kind of stuff is not the way to elicit favors from Trump.

“The Russians and Trump did not collude,” Nunberg said. “Putin is too smart to collude with Donald Trump.”

[snip]

“Donald Trump won this election on his own. He campaigned his ass off. And there is nobody who hates him more than me.”

Which is why I wonder whether Nunberg’s refusal to testify has more to do with protecting Bannon, with whom he’s still quite chummy, than the President.

“I’m not spending 80 hours going over my emails with Roger Stone and Stephen K. Bannon and producing them,” Nunberg said.

Among those listed in Nunberg’s subpoena, Bannon almost the only one who was a mild surprise.

Carter Page
Corey Lewandowski
Donald J. Trump
Hope Hicks
Keith Schiller
Michael Cohen
Paul Manafort
Rick Gates
Roger Stone
Steve Bannon
Most people on the list are known to be subjects of the investigation. Hicks (who probably is the subject of the obstruction investigation anyway) and Schiller are the two people closest to Trump at key times during the campaign. And Lewandowski was involved in managing the outreach to Europe for key periods of the campaign (and is really squirrelly about what he did after the campaign).

Which leaves Bannon, who was involved in some key meetings during the transition, and whose opposition to the Trump meeting was always about Don Jr and Manafort not involving lawyers than opposition to obtaining stolen emails generally.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/03/05/t ... han-trump/

[0_0]

but i just answered your question slad in the best way i could, and then you said in doing so i derailed the thread. in fact your tone has been antagonistic towards me from the very start of our exchange when all i did was post two videos with a different take on things. do you think there is no place for that sort of thing here?

[seemslikeadream]

no my dear you came into this thread with intentions

I had other questions and they were about trump 3 pages back right before you posted that video

and they remain unanswered

you are derailing this thread because there is a thread for Clinton which I linked for you but you have no intentions of putting your clinton stuff there

[0_0]

yes with the intention to share two videos with a different take on things. is that... wrong?

[seemslikeadream]

so sweetie quit being "unknowable" about what you are doing

you are posting anything that is not related to this thread...it has continued now for 4 pages .....period

[seemslikeadream]

Mueller’s Focus on Adviser to U.A.E. Indicates Broader Inquiry

By MARK MAZZETTI, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 3, 2018


George Nader, an adviser to the leader of the United Arab Emirates, has been questioned in the special counsel investigation, according to people with knowledge of the discussion. via C-Span
WASHINGTON — George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman, has hovered on the fringes of international diplomacy for three decades. He was a back-channel negotiator with Syria during the Clinton administration, reinvented himself as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, and last year was a frequent visitor to President Trump’s White House.

Mr. Nader is now a focus of the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. In recent weeks, Mr. Mueller’s investigators have questioned Mr. Nader and have pressed witnesses for information about any possible attempts by the Emiratis to buy political influence by directing money to support Mr. Trump during the presidential campaign, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

The investigators have also asked about Mr. Nader’s role in White House policymaking, those people said, suggesting that the special counsel investigation has broadened beyond Russian election meddling to include Emirati influence on the Trump administration. The focus on Mr. Nader could also prompt an examination of how money from multiple countries has flowed through and influenced Washington during the Trump era.

How much this line of inquiry is connected to Mr. Mueller’s original task of investigating contacts between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia is unclear. The examination of the U.A.E. comes amid a flurry of recent activity by Mr. Mueller.

Last month, investigators negotiated a plea agreement with Rick Gates, Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager, and indicted 13 Russians on charges related to a scheme to incite political discord in the United States before the 2016 election.

In one example of Mr. Nader’s influential connections, which has not been previously reported, last fall he received a detailed report from a top Trump fund-raiser, Elliott Broidy, about a private meeting with the president in the Oval Office.

Mr. Broidy owns a private security company with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the United Arab Emirates, and he extolled to Mr. Trump a paramilitary force that his company was developing for the country. He also lobbied the president to meet privately “in an informal setting” with the Emirates’ military commander and de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan; to back the U.A.E.’s hawkish policies in the region; and to fire Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

A copy of Mr. Broidy’s memorandum about the meeting was provided to The New York Times by someone critical of the Emirati influence in Washington.

Mr. Trump has closely allied himself with the Emiratis, endorsing their strong support for the new heir to the throne in Saudi Arabia, as well as their confrontational approaches toward Iran and their neighbor Qatar. In the case of Qatar, which is the host to a major United States military base, Mr. Trump’s endorsement of an Emirati- and Saudi-led blockade against that country has put him openly at odds with his secretary of state — as well as with years of American policy.



President Trump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi at the White House last year. Al Drago for The New York Times
Mr. Nader, 58, made frequent trips to the White House during the early months of the Trump administration, meeting with Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner to discuss American policy toward the Persian Gulf states in advance of Mr. Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, according to people familiar with the meetings. By some accounts, it was Mr. Bannon who pushed for him to gain access to White House policymakers. Others said Mr. Kushner backed him.

Reached by phone last month, Mr. Nader said he had dinner guests and would call back. He did not, and attempts to reach him over several weeks were unsuccessful. Mr. Nader’s lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Broidy said his memorandum had been stolen through sophisticated hacking.

“We have reason to believe this hack was sponsored and carried out by registered and unregistered agents of Qatar seeking to punish Mr. Broidy for his strong opposition to state-sponsored terrorism,” said the spokesman, adding that Mr. Broidy had also made the accusation in a letter to the Qatari ambassador in Washington.

Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, declined to comment. Axios first reported Mr. Mueller’s questioning of Mr. Nader.

Mr. Nader has long been a mysterious figure. In the 1990s, he presided over an unusual Washington magazine, Middle East Insight, which sometimes provided a platform for Arab, Israeli and Iranian officials to express their views to a Washington audience.

On the magazine’s 15th anniversary, in 1996, a West Virginia congressman praised Mr. Nader on the floor of the House, calling him a “recognized expert on the region” and pointing out that the magazine had been a showcase for prominent figures such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, and Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“He always struck me as a person who really thought he should be in the eye of the storm trying to make things happen,” said Frederic Hof, a former top American diplomat who knew Mr. Nader in the 1990s.

Late in that decade, Mr. Nader convinced the Clinton administration that he had valuable contacts in the Syrian government and took on a secretive role trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and Syria. Working with Ronald S. Lauder, the American cosmetics magnate and prominent donor to Jewish causes, Mr. Nader shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem, using his contacts in both capitals to try to negotiate a truce.



Elliott Broidy, a top Republican fund-raiser, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in 2008. David Carp/Wallenberg Committee, via Associated Press
“In the 1990s, George was a very effective under-the-radar operator in the peace process,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and a member of a team put together by President Bill Clinton to negotiate peace deals between Israel and its neighbors.

“Then, he disappeared.”

Indeed, a man with a once very public profile in Washington effectively vanished from the capital’s policy scene, and his magazine ceased publication in 2002.

During the middle part of the last decade, Mr. Nader appears to have spent most of his time in the Middle East, especially in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. He developed close ties to national security officials in the Bush White House.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, the private security company now known as Academi, at one point hired Mr. Nader to help the company generate business deals in Iraq. In a 2010 deposition that Mr. Prince gave as part of a lawsuit against the company, Mr. Prince described Mr. Nader as a “business development consultant that we retained in Iraq” because the company was looking for contracts with the Iraqi government.

Mr. Prince said that Mr. Nader was unsuccessful in getting contracts, and that senior Blackwater officials did not work directly with him.

“George pretty much worked on his own,” he said.

At the beginning of the Obama era, Mr. Nader tried to parlay his ties to the Syrian government into access to senior members of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy team, while also seeking to advance business deals with former advisers to President George W. Bush.

By the time of the 2016 election, he had become an adviser to Prince Mohammed of the U.A.E. According to people familiar with the relationship, it was around Mr. Trump’s inauguration that Mr. Nader first met Mr. Broidy, the Republican fund-raiser, who is a California-based investor with a strong interest in the Middle East.

Mr. Broidy’s security company, Circinus, provides services to both United States agencies and foreign governments. Run by former American military officers, Circinus promises on its website that it “can employ personnel worldwide to provide physical force protection to individuals, groups or facilities within austere, hostile environments,” as well as conducting “specialized operations, infrastructure protection and training.”

Mr. Broidy, 60, had once stumbled into legal trouble over payments to a political figure. In 2009, he agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for providing $1 million in illegal gifts to New York State pension authorities, including trips, payouts and a secret investment in a film called “Chooch” that was produced by an official’s brother. In exchange for the gifts, the state pension fund invested $250 million with an Israeli-based investment management firm that Mr. Broidy had founded. He reimbursed the pension fund for $18 million in fees.



Mr. Nader played host to a talk with Mr. Netanyahu in 1996. via C-Span
After the inauguration, Mr. Nader became friendly with Mr. Broidy and introduced him to Prince Mohammed. Circinus then signed contracts with the United Arab Emirates worth several hundred million dollars, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

By Oct. 6, Mr. Broidy had evidently become close enough to both the prince and Mr. Nader to send a detailed memorandum to an encrypted email address used by Mr. Nader recounting his advocacy on the U.A.E.’s behalf during the meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office amid an afternoon of stops throughout the White House.

An ally of the White House involved in one of the initiatives discussed — a counterterrorism task force — said Mr. Broidy sent the memorandum because he had been asked by the crown prince to seek the president’s views on the idea. Mr. Broidy believed that the creation of the task force would aid American security, this person said.

According to the memo, Mr. Broidy repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump to meet privately with Prince Mohammed, preferably in an informal setting outside the White House.

“I offered that M.B.Z. is available to come to the U.S. very soon and preferred a quiet meeting in New York or New Jersey,” Mr. Broidy wrote to Mr. Nader, using the crown prince’s initials. “President Trump agreed that a meeting with M.B.Z. was a good idea.”

Mr. Broidy wrote that he had twice told Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, that the crown prince “preferred an informal setting to meet one on one with President Trump.” But General McMaster resisted. “LTG McMaster smiled and replied that heads of state usually meet in the White House,” as “protocol dictates.”

In his memorandum, Mr. Broidy recounted that he had told Mr. Trump that he recently returned from meeting with the crown prince about Circinus work for the U.A.E. Mr. Broidy had explained “the exciting and transformational plan being constructed by M.B.Z. to develop a counterterrorism task force,” which Mr. Broidy told the president was “inspired” by his speech at a conference in Riyadh.

Mr. Broidy was harshly critical of the crown prince’s neighbor and nemesis, Qatar. The U.A.E. has accused Qatar, an American ally, of using its satellite network Al Jazeera to promote political Islam, among other allegations.

Mr. Trump also asked about Mr. Tillerson — who had publicly criticized the isolation of Qatar — and Mr. Broidy said that the secretary of state should be fired. “Rex was performing poorly,” Mr. Broidy said, according to the memorandum.

In between the discussions of diplomacy, business and statecraft, Mr. Broidy wrote, he and the president “spoke for several minutes about politics and the fund-raising efforts for the midterm elections as well as the state of affairs at the R.N.C.,” or the Republican National Committee.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/03/us/p ... d=pl-share

Seth Abramson
‏
(THREAD) Trump advisor Erik Prince met secretly with Putin pal/Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev, at the request of the UAE. Then Dmitriev and the UAE went to Abu Dhabi—where Prince lives—to cut a deal.

And Trump's son was in town.

Hope you'll read and share.


1/ According to The Washington Post, Prince—a Trump national security advisor—went to the Seychelles in January for a clandestine UAE-brokered meeting with Kremlin-connected RDIF CEO Kirill Dmitriev.
https://www.washingtonpost.com
The goal: establish a secret Trump-Putin backchannel.

2/ Under oath before Congress, Prince denied everything—doing so with such clear contempt for the truth and Congress that essays were written about how downright majestically he'd perjured himself to hide clandestine Team Trump dealings abroad with Russia. http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/ ... 171130.pdf …

3/ Here's my own analysis of Prince's testimony (a live-tweet thread that tracks each page of Erik Prince's lengthy conversation with Congress):Seth Abramson added,

(THREAD) Erik Prince—Trump advisor; ex-head of a murderous mercenary army; would-be head of Trump's private spy agency; would-be head of a privatized U.S. army—is a dangerous liar. He just testified under…
Show this thread

4/ Prince wouldn't tell Congress what business he discussed with the UAE Royal Family, though he says bauxite (aluminum ore) came up. He said the Dmitriev meeting was an inconsequential coincidence, though he admitted they discussed Trump, Trump's policies, and Russian sanctions.

5/ The Prince-Dmitriev meeting about a secret Russian backchannel happened on January 11, 2017. On February 21, UAE officials came to Prince's hometown, Abu Dhabi, to do a deal with—you guessed it—the Russians. The goods? Military goods—Prince's specialty. http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articl ... stors.html …

6/ Even more interesting? The seller was the Russian government, and the buyers were a consortium that included the UAE and the RDIF (remember, the UAE was meeting with the RDIF in the Seychelles the same day the UAE and the RDIF met with Trump national security advisor Prince).

7/ The $2.35 billion deal for 12% of Russian Helicopters, a Kremlin-owned company, was to a "consortium" of buyers organized by Dmitriev—not all of whose members are known. The deal brought Russian military tech to the Middle East, which effort—again—is Erik Prince's specialty.

8/ At the time Prince met with the UAE and Russia, his fellow Trump advisors Flynn, Barrack and McFarlane were in the midst of a secret lobbying campaign to end Russia sanctions and give nuclear tech to the Middle East—so Russia could build reactors there. https://www.globalresearch.ca/white-hou ... ia/5621193 …

9/ Prince and Flynn worked hand-in-glove before—in spreading the True Pundit Hoax in early November of 2016 (an effort that may have swung the 2016 election).

In January, a shared aim seemed to be a) connecting Putin and Trump, and b) aiding Russian outreach to the Middle East.

10/ Here's where things get interesting. Abu Dhabi is just an hour from Dubai—so close that the two cities may as well be a single city (like Los Angeles). So guess who was in Dubai in the 72 hours prior to the RDIF/UAE deal? That's right: Donald Trump Jr.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... olf-resort

11/ Don Jr., Prince, and Flynn were all involved in spreading the True Pundit Hoax. Flynn knows Prince; Don Jr. was Flynn's boss on the transition team; there are indications the three men all know one another. We also know Trump has violated his pledge to do no business abroad.

12/ We know too that the Steele Dossier says Putin has used the sale of Russian entities to entice Trump in the past—offering him pieces of sales of Russian entities as a hidden investor (funneling the money through the shell corporations Trump's tax returns would tell us about).

13/ There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Trump Jr. could have met Prince—and/or Dmitriev and UAE investors—in Abu Dhabi at the time the $2.35 billion Rostec deal was closing.

Certainly, Dmitriev was wooing investors the day he met with Trump's advisor Erik Prince.

14/ The smoking gun-cum-Holy Grail of the Trump-Russia investigation has for many, many months been any evidence that Trump was *successfully* in business with the Russians during the campaign or his presidency (we know he *tried* to be many, many times—see Trump Tower Moscow).

15/ Congress and Mueller must look into the mysterious February 2017 Rostec sale to see if Prince, Don Jr., or anyone else associated with the Trump family, Trump Organization, Trump campaign, or Trump administration were involved in the secretive investor group Dmitriev set up.

PS/ It's worth noting that 6 days after Dmitriev met secretly with Prince—again, a meetup whose content was *so* secret that Prince conspicuously perjured himself over it, risking prison—Dmitriev met with Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci in Davos. Someone must look into all this.


1. If Don planned to be in Abu Dhabi/Dubai for the Rostec deal, the Trump Dubai golf course opening would have been a perfect cover.

2. We know the UAE wanted to get Trump and the Russians together.

3. Prince risked perjury charges to hide what Dmitriev wanted with Trump.

[seemslikeadream]

one word

Ukraine....that ain't white collar

and why are you ignoring all the others that are co operating to save their asses from more serious crimes

what till you see Manafort plea

sounds like typical white collar crime/politician stuff to me, which is bad enough, but it's a (very) far cry from a hostile takeover of the usa by putin

that isn't what this is about...sorry you are misinformed

no way near ....typical white collar crime

no way near ....hostile takeover of the usa by putin

ORGANIZED CRIME BABY ORGANIZED CRIME


I love Hopsicker's take ...short sweet start up .....thanks rp


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScouEH9ltWs

Paul Manafort
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40370

and check out WhoWhatWhy...they know

Everything you need to know about Felix Sater
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40670

this is about the trump crime family and you will not understand it if you do not read everything

do you see putties' name down there?

[seemslikeadream]

how lovely to be able to wake up and post the Attorney General had been interviewed by the Special Council


beware the conclusion that Sessions would only be interviewed on obstruction charges (though that would be included)....he was involved in discussions of meetings w/Russians, one step removed from email offer.

maybe Stephen Miller's discussions with George Papadopoulos are why Jeff Sessions can't recall any email discussions?

Sessions Is Interviewed in Mueller’s Russia Investigation

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTJAN. 23, 2018


Attorney General Jeff Sessions was interviewed in the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling and whether President Trump obstructed justice. Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions was questioned for several hours last week by the special counsel’s office as part of the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election and whether the president obstructed justice since taking office, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The meeting marked the first time that investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, are known to have interviewed a member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.

The spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, confirmed that the interview occurred in response to questions from The New York Times.

Mr. Sessions announced in March that he had recused himself from all matters related to the 2016 election, including the Russia inquiry. The disclosure came after it was revealed that Mr. Sessions had not told Congress that he met twice with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, during the campaign. Mr. Sessions was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s presidential run.

When Mr. Trump learned in March that Mr. Sessions was considering whether to recuse himself, the president had the White House’s top lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, lobby Mr. Sessions to remain in charge of the Russia investigation.

Mr. Sessions instead followed the guidance of career prosecutors at the Justice Department, who advised him that he should not be involved with the investigation. When Mr. Trump was told of this, the president erupted in anger, saying he needed an attorney general to protect him.

As attorney general, Mr. Sessions was deeply involved in the firing of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. But Mr. Sessions’s recusal has left him with no control of Mr. Mueller — something the president has repeatedly carped about publicly and privately.

After Mr. Mueller was appointed in May, Mr. Trump again erupted at Mr. Sessions and Mr. Sessions offered to resign. Several days later, Mr. Trump rejected Mr. Sessions’s offer.

Mr. Sessions, who was accompanied by the longtime Washington lawyer Chuck Cooper to the interview, had been among a small group of senior campaign and administration officials whom Mr. Mueller had not yet interviewed. Two weeks ago, Mr. Mueller subpoenaed Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, to testify before a grand jury. Mr. Mueller is expected to forgo the grand jury appearance for now and will have his investigators interview Mr. Bannon in the coming weeks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/us/p ... d=tw-share

NYT: Mueller Questioned Jeff Sessions For Hours Last Week
By Nicole Lafond | January 23, 2018 9:59 am

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions holds a news conference at the Department of Justice December 15, 2017 in Washington, DC. Sessions called the question-and-answer session with reporters to highlight his department's fight to reduce violent crime.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images North America
Special Counsel Robert Mueller questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions for several hours last week, making Sessions the first known member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet to be interviewed in Mueller’s Russia probe, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed the interview took place in response to the Times’ questions about the probe. Sessions’s attorney Chuck Cooper attended the interview with him, according to the Times.

In March, Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and that’s also looking at whether Trump or his campaign officials colluded with the foreign power to win the election. Former FBI Director Mueller was then appointed to take over the probe.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ ... by-mueller

Who Else Was Handling Russian Money in 2016?

The interference went well beyond the president*'s campaign.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JAN 18, 2018

Life is full of wonderful surprises, like this little goodie bag from the McClatchy folks.

The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy. FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.
It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.
So, here’s the horse, but the barn is waaaaayyyyy over there. Still, this is a fascinating development.

Disclosure of the Torshin investigation signals a new dimension in the 18-month-old FBI probe of Russia’s interference. McClatchy reported a year ago that a multi-agency U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s intervention, begun even before the start of the 2016 general election campaign, initially included a focus on whether the Kremlin secretly helped fund efforts to boost Trump, but little has been said about that possibility in recent months. The extent to which the FBI has evidence of money flowing from Torshin to the NRA, or of the NRA’s participation in the transfer of funds, could not be learned. However, the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.
It is a savory irony that Wayne LaPierre, the savior of all that is clean and good in America, may be tied into the Volga Bagmen. But it’s coming time to wonder how much Russian money was sloshing around the entire Republican Party in 2016, and around the conservative infrastructure generally.

We already know the winning presidential campaign was redolent of herring and vodka. There also is more than a little evidence that various Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats were generous to Republican campaigns in general. Now, it seems, the various interest groups and issue organizations may have had their hands out, too. The only thing that stops a bagman with a bag is a good guy with a bag.

Congressman: Story of Link Between Kremlin And NRA Could ‘Get Bigger’

“Follow the money,” Rep. Ted Lieu said of the National Rifle Association’s pro-Trump efforts.

Last Thursday, investigative reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy DC Bureau reported what could be another bombshell in the Russia probe: that the FBI is investigating whether a Kremlin-linked banker illegally channeled funds to the National Rifle Association to aid Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

On Friday, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, told me on SiriusXM Progress that the word on Capitol Hill is that the story of a Russia-NRA-Trump link is going to grow.

“FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA,” Stone and Gordon reported being told by two sources familiar with the matter.

More: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/te ... mg00000004

Torshin was all up in Wisconsin

NRA Gives $3.6 Million to Walker, Legislators

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign
NRA Gives $3.6 Million to Walker, Legislators
Just one Democrat benefits from gun lobby’s generous donations.
By Wisconsin Democracy Campaign - Oct 5th, 2017 11:10 am

..... In Wisconsin, the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent about $3.6 million between January 2008 and June 2017 on outside electioneering activities and direct contributions to GOP Gov. Scott Walker, 52 legislators, and a legislative campaign committee.

Most of the spending, about $3.5 million, was by the NRA on outside electioneering to help Walker win his 2010 general, 2012 recall and 2014 reelection bids. Walker also received $22,500 in direct campaign contributions from pro-gun interests – the most of any legislative or statewide candidate – between January 2008 and June 2017.
In addition to Walker, current legislators received about $92,400 (see table below) in outside electioneering support and direct campaign contributions from the NRA’s political action committees and corporation, between January 2008 and June 2017. All but $500 went to support GOP legislators.

During much of the same time, Walker and GOP legislators, who took control of state government in January 2011, have approved numerous pro-gun bills led by state’s concealed carry law.

More recently, last month, a state Senate committee recommended passage of a proposal, Senate Bill 169, which would allow adults to carry concealed weapons in Wisconsin without a permit. ................

[seemslikeadream]

The Professor At The Center Of The Russia-Trump Probe Boasted To His Girlfriend In Ukraine That He Was Friends With Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

A Ukrainian woman named Anna says Joseph Mifsud asked her to marry him in a restaurant overlooking the Kremlin. Later, he allegedly told a Trump campaign aide that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. She hasn’t heard from him since that news broke in October.

Alberto NardelliFebruary 27, 2018, at 11:11 a.m.
Joseph Mifsud
Provided to BuzzFeed News / Laura Gallant
Amid the opportunists, weirdos, trolls, and pawns who make up the cast of the Russian plot to interfere in American politics, Joseph Mifsud stands out.

The Maltese professor, who allegedly delivered word of Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails to Donald Trump's campaign, is an authentically mysterious figure, his true role and ties to Russian intelligence unclear.

And while others like former Trump campaign aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page — and their friends and girlfriends — told their stories, Mifsud went to ground. His biography disappeared from one university where he taught and he quit his job at another university. His email and cell phones went dead. And politicians, colleagues, and journalists can't find him.

Neither can Anna, his 31-year-old Ukrainian fiancé, who says he is the father of her newborn child. And her story, snatched from the pages of a John le Carré novel, offers a glimpse at the human collateral damage of an intelligence operation in which the mysterious Mifsud was allegedly a central figure.

Anna, whom BuzzFeed News has agreed to identify only by her first name because she doesn’t want the attention, says she was seven months pregnant and engaged to Mifsud when he became the focus of world media attention as the professor who told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton.

Shortly thereafter, he dropped from sight. He also cut off all contact with Anna, including phone calls and WhatsApp messages. That silence has held, even six weeks after the daughter Anna says he fathered was born.

“He never helped me,” she said. “Only talk and promises.”

BuzzFeed News first contacted Anna in October. She refused to talk then, saying her relationship with Mifsud was private. According to WhatsApp messages she later shared, she told the professor about BuzzFeed News’ attempt to speak to her — and in his very last WhatsApp message to Anna, Mifsud asked her not to talk to journalists.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
Now, however, feeling deceived, she’s changed her mind. The result is new information about Mifsud’s activities, including his claim of having dined with Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.

“He said, ‘I have dinner with Lavrov tonight. Lavrov is my friend. Lavrov this, Lavrov that,’” Anna said. “He even show me picture with Lavrov.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In a series of WhatsApp messages sent in May 2017, Mifsud also told Anna he was in Saudi Arabia at the same time as President Donald Trump’s visit, and in Sicily, Italy, for the G7 Summit.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
Mifsud did not respond to repeated requests for comment, which BuzzFeed News made to multiple phone numbers and email accounts, as well as via WhatsApp and Signal. Several of his family members, colleagues, and Facebook friends also did not return requests for comment. Mifsud acknowledged in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica published last November that he met former Trump campaign aide Papadopoulos “three or four times,” and facilitated connections between "official and unofficial sources," but denied any wrongdoing.

In addition to meeting Anna in Kiev, BuzzFeed News spoke to her multiple times in the past month over Facebook messenger, via WhatsApp, on the telephone, and in a video call.

She provided access to her entire WhatsApp history with Mifsud. She also shared dozens of photos of the couple together, including in Ukraine and Russia. BuzzFeed News has seen many photos of the baby and of Anna during different stages of her pregnancy and at the clinic where she gave birth. Anna also said that she wants to do a DNA test to prove that Mifsud is the father of the baby.

Parts of the conversation with Anna in the Ukrainian capital were in her fractured English, and others took place through an interpreter. Some quotes have been edited for clarity.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
Anna told BuzzFeed News that she first met Mifsud about four years ago at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

He approached her while she was taking a selfie and, using English, offered to take her picture. They spoke for a bit, and he invited her to dinner, she said.

The two met again in Moscow a few months later — and “then he came to Ukraine,” Anna said, “to celebrate my niece’s birthday.”

Over the next three years, Mifsud visited Ukraine about 10 times, Anna said. “He came to celebrate a New Year, birthdays, my sister’s baby. He knew all my family. Something we celebrate, he would come. We had a good relationship,” she said.

In late October 2015, Mifsud proposed to her. Anna says they were at a restaurant overlooking the Kremlin in Moscow celebrating Anna’s sister’s birthday. The Maltese academic asked Anna to marry him at the restaurant, and gave her a ring.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
“We had a plan to live in Rome. We spoke about this, but only speak,” Anna, who works in marketing, said. “He tell me, I want a baby with you, I want a family with you.”

When the couple split up for a few months in 2016, Mifsud sent her an email asking her to return the ring and handbags, one of which was a Chanel handbag that Mifsud had bought for her during a visit to Rome in spring 2015. In the Italian capital, they stayed in a hotel where “people came to see him all the time,” Anna said.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
According to Anna’s WhatsApp messages, he often shared news of his activities, sending Anna links to his interviews and photos from events he was speaking at, and telling her about his work as a professor at the now-closed London Academy of Diplomacy.

But he also had a secretive side. According to Anna, he asked her to delete photos from Facebook where she could be seen drinking, after she uploaded one holding a cocktail. “He said, ‘because I am important man.’” He also demanded she unfriend anyone she hadn’t met in person.

Over the course of what Anna describes as an on-and-off relationship spanning three years, the couple saw each other in Rome, Moscow, and Kiev. But unlike in Rome and Moscow, where Mifsud frequently received visitors, Mifsud didn’t use his trips to Ukraine to network. “He didn’t meet people in Kiev. ‘Russia-Ukraine relationship not good, and I do a lot of work in Moscow,’” Anna recalled Mifsud saying.

Anna said she and Mifsud last met in person in Kiev in early April 2017. He told her then that he had recently been questioned by the FBI in the US, she said.

“He told me he was in his hotel room when he was called downstairs by reception. It was the FBI. He said they wanted to talk about connections he set up between people in Britain and Russia.”

“He said his phone was probably being checked,” Anna added.

In mid-May, about a month after Mifsud left Kiev, Anna found out she was pregnant. And six weeks ago she gave birth to a baby girl.

After finding out that she was pregnant, according to WhatsApp messages seen by BuzzFeed News, Mifsud repeatedly told Anna he really wanted to see her and promised to visit her soon, but he never did, often making excuses or citing health reasons.

“For 7 months, 'I come, I come,'” Anna said. “He never helped me. Only talk and promises.”

Mifsud at first expressed “shock” at the news of Anna’s pregnancy. He asked if she slept with anyone during a recent work trip she’d made to Denmark and Norway, and whether she wanted to keep the baby.

But in later messages, he put his initial reaction down to being surprised and told Anna that he was “super excited” and that the “child will have great parents.”


Provided to BuzzFeed News
In messages sent in late September, Mifsud wrote, “You will be the most beautiful mummy … I cannot stop thinking of you.” In another message, he wrote, “I am so proud of youuuuu I think we need to get a nanny to help you.”

But there were also signs that Mifsud was not as enthusiastic as he portrayed himself, and the tone of their messages changed in the final months of her pregnancy. The professor stopped answering the phone and would reply only to Anna’s WhatsApp messages, saying he was ill with heart problems or in the hospital, but promising to fly to her as soon as he was given the green light.

In one message, Anna accused Mifsud of backtracking on a promise to help her. He replied by saying he couldn’t recall any promises, and that he continued to be ill. And, apparently casting doubt on the child’s paternity, he wrote that once he was well again, they would do the DNA test that Anna had been asking for.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
In late October, he told her in a message that he was “fighting to live.”


Provided to BuzzFeed News
Just days later, on Nov. 1, one day after Papadopoulos’s guilty plea was unsealed in Washington, La Repubblica published an interview with him at the Rome university where he was working, in which he acknowledged being the unnamed professor referenced in the court documents in which investigators allege that Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians had dirt on Clinton. The journalist who did the interview said in an email that it had taken place the previous day.


Provided to BuzzFeed News
When Mifsud’s name was thrust upon the world stage, the WhatsApp messages stopped.

Anna says that she was surprised by the news of the allegations. “I really believed he was sick,” she said.

“I am angry with myself. I did not see what he really is!” Anna wrote in a Facebook message last month. “Joseph only promised me...many promises.”

In what was one of Mifsud’s last messages to her, the 57-year-old professor wrote — after she reminded him that the baby was due soon and that they hadn’t seen one another in months — that either she give him time to recover or their paths would go different ways.

“We still need to speak face to face,” he said, apparently referencing the baby. “We never did.”


Provided to BuzzFeed News
Mifsud remains one of the mysteries in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and possible Trump campaign collusion. According to court documents, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of emails from Democrats in April 2016, two months before the Democrats themselves were aware that their computer system had been hacked. Mifsud told Papadopoulos he’d learned of the emails during a trip to Russia, but who told him is unknown.

Papadopoulos is reported to have later shared the information with the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, whose government passed the information to US authorities after WikiLeaks began publishing the emails in July 2016. That information sparked the FBI to launch the investigation that Mueller now leads.

Exactly how Mifsud and Papadopoulos met also is not publicly known, though Papadopoulos is cooperating with the Mueller probe. Mifsud allegedly showed little interest in Papadopoulos until he learned that Papadopoulos had been named to Trump’s campaign.

Mifsud’s professional ventures before the Papadopoulos guilty plea are also in dispute. Papadopoulos’s fiancé, Simona Mangiante, whom Mifsud hired in 2016 to work at the grand-sounding London Centre of International Law Practice, another UK-based organization where the Maltese academic held a senior position, told BuzzFeed News that she never understood what the organization did.

“I never understood if it was a facade for something else,” she said when reached by phone in January. “It wasn’t a serious thing. For starters, I never understood what I was doing there, and they never paid me for three months, so I just said ‘OK, enough.’”

The center did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked for her thoughts on Mifsud, Mangiante said, “My impression [is that] he was not a transparent person and I never understood what he was really doing.”
https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardell ... fwrWxkM41G

New Mueller bombshell hints that Rick Gates may have delivered the goods in Trump-Russia probe

The office of special counsel Robert Mueller has now proposed dropping charges against former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, in what might be the strongest sign yet that Gates has given the investigation significant information related to its probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

As reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney, the special counsel’s office has officially proposed dropping 17 separate charges against Gates from a superseding indictment that it issued last week.


Gates, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential election, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy against the United States and lying to federal investigators last week. Gates’ guilty plea came shortly after the special counsel’s office issued a new 32-count indictment against Gates and Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who faces charges related to money laundering and tax fraud.https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/new-mu ... sia-probe/

Mueller just made a move indicating Rick Gates has something of significant value to offer him
Sonam Sheth
3h 31,727

A federal court in Virginia granted the special counsel Robert Mueller's request to dismiss more than 20 charges brought against Rick Gates, the former deputy chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Gates pleaded guilty last week to two counts and is cooperating with the special counsel's office.
Mueller's decision to drop the charges indicates Gates most likely has something of significant value to offer him.
A federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Tuesday granted a motion by the special counsel Robert Mueller's office to dismiss several charges brought against Rick Gates, the former deputy chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The charges were brought on Thursday in a 32-count superseding indictment that accused Gates and Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, of financial crimes related to tax and bank fraud. Gates was charged with 24 counts related to tax fraud, bank fraud, bank-fraud conspiracy, and failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Gates pleaded guilty on Friday to one count of conspiracy against the US and one count of making a false statement to federal investigators.

He and Manafort had also been charged in October with 12 counts including conspiracy against the US, conspiracy to launder money, being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, making false and misleading statements, and failing to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Manafort has since maintained his innocence.

Gates was a key player during critical moments surrounding the 2016 US election, and the motion to dismiss the charges against him is most likely a sign he has something of value to offer Mueller, who's investigating Russia's interference in the election.

Gates joined the Trump campaign in early 2016 and worked as a deputy under Manafort, then the campaign chairman. Manafort stepped down that August after news reports surfaced about his murky ties to Ukraine's pro-Russia Party of Regions — and as Trump slumped in polls.

But even after Manafort's departure, Gates maintained a significant role in the campaign's operations, reportedly at the request of Steve Bannon, who became the head of the campaign.

In addition to working as an intermediary between the campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2016, Gates frequently traveled with Trump and later served as an adviser on the inaugural committee after Trump's election in November.

Gates was eventually ousted from a pro-Trump lobbying group in April amid questions about Russia's interference in the election, but he continued to visit the White House as late as June, according to The Daily Beast.

Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor, said in an email Tuesday that last week's 32-count indictment, which was filed in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, could be described as a "rocket docket."

"Their cases move as or more quickly than cases anywhere else in the country," Sandick said. "Gates would need to plead guilty to these counts in the next couple of months and then be sentenced promptly — in three or four months."

He added that Mueller would most likely need more time than that to "harvest Gates' cooperation."

"Once the cooperating defendant is sentenced, the prosecutor has much less leverage to encourage cooperation," Sandick said.

But because judges in the district typically do not adjourn sentencing, Mueller opted to dismiss the charges "without prejudice," Sandick said, which ensures they could be reinstated in the future if needed.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mueller- ... sed-2018-2

A self-described sex expert says she will spill information on Trump and Russia to get out of a Thai jail

Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska, on whose yacht Nastya Rybka said she shot some compromising video. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin/File Photo
MOSCOW — A self-described sex expert whose videos highlighted the ties between one of Russia’s richest men and the Kremlin has been jailed in Thailand and is calling for U.S. help, claiming she has information about links between Russia and President Trump.

Anastasia Vashukevich, an escort-service worker from Belarus who catapulted to a certain measure of fame after filming a yacht trip with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, was detained in Thailand over the weekend in a police raid on her “sex training” seminar. While still in custody on Tuesday, she published Instagram videos asking U.S. journalists and intelligence agencies to help her.

Deripaska, with whom Vashukevich said she had an affair, used to employ former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. But Vashukevich, better known by the alias Nastya Rybka, provided no evidence on Tuesday to back up the claim that she had new information to offer related to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A post to her Instagram account showed her sitting on the floor of what was described as a Thai jail cell and said she was sick.

“I am the only witness and the missing link in the connection between Russia and the U.S. elections — the long chain of Oleg Deripaska, Prikhodko, Manafort, and Trump,” Vashukevich said in a live Instagram video Tuesday, apparently shot as she was driven in an open-air police van through the Thai resort city of Pattaya. “In exchange for help from U.S. intelligence services and a guarantee of my safety, I am prepared to provide the necessary information to America or to Europe or to the country which can buy me out of Thai prison.”

Vashukevich said in her video that she had already given an interview to U.S. broadcaster NBC. Representatives for Vashukevich and Deripaska did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman declined to comment.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny made Vashukevich famous last month after he broadcast old footage from her Instagram account showing an August 2016 yacht trip with Deripaska and Prikhodko. Navalny used the footage to allege that Deripaska, a metals magnate, had bribed Prikhodko, one of Russia’s most influential government officials, with the luxury getaway accompanied by women from an escort service.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny attends an opposition march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in central Moscow on Feb. 25. / AFP PHOTO / Vasily MAXIMOV/AFP/Getty Images
Navalny also speculated that Deripaska and Prikhodko may have served as a link between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign in 2016, though Vashukevich’s videos offered no proof. According to emails described to The Washington Post last year, Manafort — who once worked for Deripaska — directed an associate to offer Deripaska “private briefings” about Trump’s presidential campaign. A Deripaska spokeswoman said he was never offered such briefings.

Prikhodko called Navalny a “political loser” whose investigation combined “the possible and the impossible.” Deripaska said Navalny’s “allegations have nothing to do with reality” and sued Vashukevich for violating his privacy. A court ordered Instagram to remove some of Vashukevich’s posts.

According to her Instagram account, Vashukevich was in Dubai when Navalny’s video came out and then traveled to the Thai beach resort of Pattaya. On Sunday, according to Russian news reports, Thai police raided a sex seminar for Russian tourists in which Vashukevich was participating. Attendees paid more than $600 each for a five-day course, Russian media said.

A video from a Thai morning news broadcast showed the police operation. Some of those detained were working without a permit, one of the TV hosts said. “Why do they have to use Thailand to teach this course?” he added.


Russian Embassy consul Vladimir Sosnov told the RIA Novosti Russian state news agency that Vashukevich and several others were detained for being part of an “illegal training session” and that she and her companions would be put on trial and deported. But Vashukevich claimed on Tuesday that she was arrested on orders of Russian officials as payback for her video of Deripaska and Prikhodko and that she expected to be sent to Russia, where she would be jailed again.

Today's WorldView newsletter
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“Please USA save us from Russia!” said a post in English on her Instagram account. “All this cases are political repressions!”

Coincidentally or not, one of Russia’s most important security and intelligence officials was also in Thailand on Tuesday. Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, former head of the Federal Security Service, held talks Tuesday in Bangkok on the security of Russian tourists, RIA Novosti reported.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ... e50075a03f

[seemslikeadream]

progressively stranger

Roger Stone's Secret Messages with WikiLeaks

Transcripts obtained by The Atlantic show Donald Trump's longtime confidante corresponded with the radical-transparency group.

Natasha Bertrand
4:33 PM ET

On March 17, 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that it had never communicated with Roger Stone, a longtime confidante and informal adviser to President Donald Trump. In his interview with the House Intelligence Committee last September, Stone, who testified under oath, told lawmakers that he had communicated with WikiLeaks via an “intermediary,” whom he identified only as a “journalist.” He declined to reveal that person’s identity to the committee, he told reporters later.

Private Twitter messages obtained by The Atlantic show that Stone and WikiLeaks, a radical-transparency group, communicated directly on October 13, 2016—and that WikiLeaks sought to keep its channel to Stone open after Trump won the election. The existence of the secret correspondence marks yet another strange twist in the White House’s rapidly swelling Russia scandal. Stone and Trump have been friends for decades, which raises key questions about what the president knew about Stone’s interactions with Wikileaks during the campaign. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The depth of Stone’s relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has been closely scrutinized by congressional investigators examining whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia—or anyone serving as a cut-out for Moscow—to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Stone confirmed the authenticity of the messages, but called them “ridiculously out of context” and “a paste up.” He said that he provided the complete exchange to the House Intelligence Committee, but did not immediately respond to a request to provide his own record of the conversation to The Atlantic.

A screenshot of the exchange, which has not been previously reported, was provided to the House Intelligence Committee last year by a third-party source. The private messages confirm that Stone considered himself a “friend” of WikiLeaks, which was branded a “non-state hostile intelligence service” by CIA Director Mike Pompeo last April. Stone insisted that the messages vindicated his account. “They prove conclusively that I had no advance knowledge of content or source of WikiLeaks publications,” he said. “I merely had confirmed Assange’s public claim that he had information on Hillary Clinton and he would publish it.” He also narrowed the scope of his earlier denials, saying that he’d only denied having communicated directly with Assange, not with Wikileaks. Wikileaks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.


These messages have been reproduced by The Atlantic’s art team.

“I have never said or written that I had any direct communication with Julian Assange and have always clarified in numerous interviews and speeches that my communication with WikiLeaks was through the aforementioned journalist,” Stone told the committee in his prepared statement in September. The full hearing was held behind closed doors and the transcript has not been made public. At least one lawmaker had already obtained a screenshot of the exchange before Stone testified, according to two sources familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation.

The correspondence raises questions about whether Stone—who served as Trump’s lobbyist in Washington in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and had been encouraging him to run for president for over a decade—has kept secret any interactions that may be of interest to congressional investigators examining Russia’s election interference.

Stone also exchanged private Twitter messages in August and September of 2016 with a user known as Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer claimed in a posting on their Wordpress site to have “penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers,” but the self-described hacker was later characterized by U.S. officials as a front for Russian military intelligence. Stone only published that exchange after it was revealed by The Smoking Gun, a website that publishes mugshots and other public documents.

On the afternoon of October 13, 2016, Stone sent WikiLeaks a private Twitter message. “Since I was all over national TV, cable and print defending wikileaks and assange against the claim that you are Russian agents and debunking the false charges of sexual assault as trumped up bs you may want to rexamine the strategy of attacking me- cordially R.”

WikiLeaks—whose Twitter account is run “by a rotating staff,” according to Assange—replied an hour later: “We appreciate that. However, the false claims of association are being used by the democrats to undermine the impact of our publications. Don’t go there if you don’t want us to correct you.”

“Ha!” Stone responded on October 15. “The more you ‘correct’ me the more people think you’re lying. Your operation leaks like a sieve. You need to figure out who your friends are.” Assange’s internet connection was cut off days later by the Ecuadorian embassy—which granted him diplomatic asylum in London in 2012—following WikiLeaks’ release of emails that had been stolen by Russian hackers from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s inbox. The morning after Donald Trump won the election, however, WikiLeaks sent Stone another message. “Happy? We are now more free to communicate.”

It is unclear whether Stone and WikiLeaks kept in touch, using Twitter or another platform, after the election. WikiLeaks continued to insist through at least last March that neither the organization nor Assange had ever communicated with Stone directly. Stone later identified radio host Randy Credico as the intermediary, but Credico denied that in an interview with The Daily Beast earlier this month. “There was no backchannel to Roger Stone, and I think that his testimony was a lot of bravado,” Credico said. “Roger’s a showman.”

The substance of the messages does seem to corroborate, however, Stone and WikiLeaks’ denials prior to October 13 that they had coordinated in any significant way. WikiLeaks indicated that Stone’s claims of association—even if through a backchannel, as Stone alleged—were false. But the screenshots do not show whether Stone and WikiLeaks communicated prior to October 13 or after November 9, 2016.

Democrats have asked GOP members to subpoena Twitter for the private messages of Trump associates currently under investigation in the Russia probe, according to one of the sources familiar with the internal proceedings. But the majority has so far refused. Mike Conaway, the Texas Republican who is leading the Intelligence Committee's investigation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As The Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe first disclosed last fall, WikiLeaks also exchanged private Twitter messages with Donald Trump Jr., who provided the correspondence to congressional investigators. WikiLeaks continued to message Trump Jr. through July 2017, “actively soliciting” his cooperation on ventures ranging from obtaining the president’s tax returns to appointing Assange Australia’s U.S. ambassador.

On July 22, 2016, just before the Democratic National Convention kicked off, WikiLeaks published thousands of emails that had been stolen from Democratic National Committee servers by hackers the U.S. intelligence community has since linked back to Russia. Stone told the Southwest Broward Republican Organization on August 8 that he had “communicated with Assange” and believed that “the next tranche of his documents”—which Assange had hinted at in an earlier interview with CNN— pertained to the Clinton Foundation. Stone soon walked that back, claiming instead that he communicated with Assange via an intermediary who he identified last November as Randy Credico. He declined to identify the intermediary in his interview with the House Intelligence Committee, but later changed his mind and claimed it had been Credico.

On October 4, 2016, Assange held a press conference to mark WikiLeaks’s 10th anniversary. The event had been hyped by supporters of then-candidate Trump, including Stone, as an “October surprise” that would completely derail Clinton’s presidential campaign just over a month before the election. On October 2, Stone told the far-right talk-radio host Alex Jones that he had been “assured that the mother lode” was coming. The next day, he tweeted that he had “total confidence that @wikileaks” and his “hero Julian Assange” would come through.

At his press conference, however, Assange gave no hints of what was to come, leaving his fans, and many of Trump’s, disappointed. Still, Stone was not deterred. “Libs thinking Assange will stand down are wishful thinking. Payload coming #Lockthemup,” he tweeted on October 5, 2016.

The payload actually came two days later: WikiLeaks began publishing the contents of Podesta’s inbox, which had been infiltrated by Russian hackers seven months earlier. Stone told The Daily Caller on October 12 that Assange had delayed the email dump on purpose: “I was led to believe that there would be a major release on a previous Wednesday,” he said. He denied, however, that he had been given “advance knowledge of the details” and maintained that he was only in touch with Assange “through an intermediary.”

On the morning of October 13, WikiLeaks issued a clarification: “WikiLeaks has never communicated with Roger Stone as we have previously, repeatedly stated.” It was later that day when Stone confronted WikiLeaks in a private message, and accused the organization of “attacking” him. WikiLeaks did not seem phased by the confrontation, and re-opened its line of communication with Stone on November 9. Fourteen months later, Stone visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up for more than five years.

“I didn’t go and see” Assange, Stone told The Daily Beast last month. “I dropped off a card to be a smart ass.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ks/554432/

Seth Abramson

BREAKING: Per Atlantic Story, Roger Stone Could Now Be Charged With a Federal Felony at Any Time for Lying Under Oath to Congress

(In other words, Mueller has him if/when he wants him—it's only a question of the timing and manner of the indictment, now. And Stone knows a *lot*.)
‏
2/ Stone told Congress he never spoke directly to WikiLeaks—after first reviewing his Twitter correspondence. Now we know he in fact had such contact—so he lied, and knowingly, about a fact absolutely critical to the Mueller investigation. I'd expect him to eventually be charged.

3/ Remember—Stone and Trump have both lied about the nature, frequency and timing of their contacts. You should consider Stone—as you read the Atlantic story—one of Trump's top advisors (and one of his oldest confidants).

Remember, too, that Don Jr. had WikiLeaks contacts also.

[0_0]

so sweetie quit being "unknowable" about what you are doing

you are posting anything that is not related to this thread...it has continued now for 4 pages .....period

wow arent you the little condescending cutiepie.. both of my videos were totally germane to the subject at hand and i posted them in a very polite inoffensive way unlike you literally using quoted copypaste of already posted material to stifle any other voices you don't approve of. it's almost like you're not interested in any kind of discussion at all

[seemslikeadream]

Have you check out Hopsicker's latest video?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScouEH9ltWs

Looks like the beginning of a series.

thanks ....Pavel Vrublevsky

Re: Tea Pot Dome, Watergate, Trump: Crime, Cover-up and Curi
... sources say, they are being prosecuted for leaking information to the United States on the Russian founder of the Chronopay payment system, Pavel Vrublevsky, in a case that goes back to 2011. https://themoscowtimes.com/news/the-bel ... king-59810 ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Tea Pot Dome, Watergate, Trump: Crime, Cover-up and Curious

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... sources say, they are being prosecuted for leaking information to the United States on the Russian founder of the Chronopay payment system, Pavel Vrublevsky, in a case that goes back to 2011. https://themoscowtimes.com/news/the-bel ... king-59810 ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon
... to alt-right stock fraud Posted on March 6, 2017 by Daniel Hopsicker http://www.madcowprod.com/wp-content/up ... 03/pv1.jpg Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman under investigation in the FBI’s probe of Russian hacking in the 2016 Presidential election, shared a business address ...
by stillrobertpaulsen
Thu Mar 30, 2017 3:49 pm

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... claimed for years that Mikhailov was trading information on cybercriminals with the West. Mikhailov had reportedly testified in the case of Pavel Vrublevsky, the former head of the payment services company Chronopay, who was imprisoned in 2013 for ordering a denial of service attack on the website ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*
... the perpetrators of the cyberattacks. According to Novaya Gazeta, Fomenko rented computer-server space to another Russian entrepreneur named Pavel Vrublevsky, who ran an electronic payment company called Chronopay and in 2013 was convicted of cyberattacks on Russian companies. Mikhailov reportedly ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Re: 500M Yahoo accounts hacked US just blamed 2 Russian Spie
... because it is not a clear accusation." According to Russian media, the arrests relate to old accusations made by a Russian businessman, Pavel Vrublevsky. Pavel Vrublevsk, founder of an online payments company, accused the four men of leaking sensitive information to the United States in 2010. ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: 500M Yahoo accounts hacked US just blamed 2 Russian Spies

Re: Policing by Consent
... Russian in hacking probe linked to alt-right stock fraud Posted on March 6, 2017 by Daniel Hopsicker Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman under investigation in the FBI’s probe of Russian hacking in the 2016 Presidential election, shared a business address ...
by fruhmenschen

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Policing by Consent

Re: The Little Führer
Russian in hacking probe linked to alt-right stock fraud Posted on March 6, 2017 by Daniel Hopsicker Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman under investigation in the FBI’s probe of Russian hacking in the 2016 Presidential election, shared a business address in John Gotti’s ...
by American Dream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: The Little Führer

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... and other US companies, which were then shared with the country's government agencies. The claims were made in 2010 by Russian businessman Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of online payments firm ChronoPay. According to the businessman and unnamed sources speaking to the publication, the arrests ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... been arrested. https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/20 ... ource=push Moscow Spy Scandal Snowballs: What We Know Vrublevsky later told Krebs in 2011 that he believed Mikhailov was the one who stole the e-mails and leaked them. Krebs said Vrublevsky was also convinced ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... (Шалтай-Болтай). According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the arrests may very well be tied to a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump malware and hundreds of billions of ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Trea
... in 2012, when he conducted a journalistic investigation about the criminal case against the founder and CEO of processing company Chronopay Pavel Vrublevsky. The businessman then accused Mikhailov in the fabrication of the criminal case. Later, in the process, in the Tushino district court, Sergey ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: Russia Biggest Cybersecurity Firm Head Arrested For Treason

Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*
... on the website of a Russian cyber entrepreneur who reportedly does business with the company. Mikhailov has links to that entrepreneur, Pavel Vrublevsky, and testified that he knew him during a 2012 trial against him for cyberattacking a business rival, Novaya Gazeta reported. News of Mikhailov’s ...
by seemslikeadream

Forum: General Discussion
Topic: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*
... the perpetrators of the cyberattacks. According to Novaya Gazeta, Fomenko rented computer-server space to another Russian entrepreneur named Pavel Vrublevsky, who ran an electronic payment company called Chronopay and in 2013 was convicted of cyberattacks on Russian companies. Mikhailov reportedly ...

search.php?keywords=VRUBLEVSKY&fid%5B0%5D=8

[seemslikeadream]

so sweetie quit being "unknowable" about what you are doing

you are posting anything that is not related to this thread...it has continued now for 4 pages .....period

wow arent you the little condescending cutiepie.. both of my videos were totally germane to the subject at hand and i posted them in a very polite inoffensive way unlike you literally using quoted copypaste of already posted material to stifle any other voices you don't approve of. it's almost like you're not interested in any kind of discussion at all

yea a video that was 8 months old and an extremely edited 35 second video...good luck with that

means nothing

you are not interested in dicussion at all please don't pretend that

politely derailing...is that what the kids are calling it these days?

[0_0]

you know what i'm almost starting to suspect it's you that has some not very sincere intentions

[seemslikeadream]

your intentions are to derail this thread and have proven that over and over